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Huh? Wasn't anybody using the Matrix bridge to Libera Chat IRC? Seems like IRC is really dead and only used by a very tiny small minority of people.
by colesantiago 3y ago
Huh?
Wasn't anybody using the Matrix bridge to Libera Chat IRC?
Seems like IRC is really dead and only used by a very tiny small minority of people.
- PostOnce 3y agoWizards use IRC, and their apprentices use discord. Some of the most deeply technical people in the world use IRC. Being able to talk to them is a superpower.
- shadowgovt 3y agoIRC's biggest weakness is the protocol didn't transition cleanly to a mobile world. But apart from that, it's still as good as it always was.
- mlyle 3y agoIRC's biggest weakness is the lack of a consistent history mechanism and that you usually need to idle.
- sitzkrieg 3y agothings like irccloud made this easier for consumers this but it was too late
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wkat4242 3y agoAs does quassel <3
- doublerabbit 3y agoIRCs other biggest weakness is that to host images is a PITA. As is sending files. DCC works, if/when it wants.
- superkuh 3y agoHosting images is a great way to waste a lot of money and have to hire a squad of lawyers. There's a reason free image hosts have well known short lifecycles. The strength of IRC is that it is mostly stateless. Just lists of IPs subscribed to sockets.
- doublerabbit 3y agoAs beautiful as it is. You don't need to host anything. Image capabilities are still possible as all you'll need to do is encode media in to base32 and then spew that to brother channel, #hn-images or something. IRC is perfect for long blinding data dumps. If the user opts in to imagery, let the client connect to that channel. Sure you'll loose out on the image if you were not available but irc is like that anyway. Having your client throw [image:~hackernews_logo] to indicate that you've posted an image is no less spam than someone announcing that they've changed their nick to "doublerabbit|Zzz".
- mortallywounded 3y agoputs on wizard hat
- Syonyk 3y agoIndeed. The only sane place on the internet to get answers to a range of deeply technical questions about modern tech (or, at least, a discussion that will get you closer to the answer) I've found is IRC. It's filled with a lot of "old tech guys who have been doing this forever." And, often enough, that's who you need to make sense of some bit of architectural manual arcana. Discord is awful. It's most of the downsides of IRC, with all the downsides of a centralized company running it, with a very resource heavy client. You can run IRC on just about nothing (I ran an IRC network in college on a 16MHz 68030 with 8MB RAM just fine), and I know quite a few quiet little backwaters servers doing exactly that.
- doublerabbit 3y agoDiscord is as if IRC and MSN/Y!M/AIM had an orgy and gave birth to an illegitimate child. Discord got it right but wrong. Channels are correct. Image / File sharing is correct Closed gardens and gimmicks with paid subscriptions is where it falls.
- immibis 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing a ton of this. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- blueflow 3y ago10-15k Users were using it, its quite a big thing. You can see the user count drop around 4th August: https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php
- koito17 3y agoI pretty much only used Matrix as a glorified IRC bouncer that worked across my devices. When the libera.chat bridges went away, I just stopped using Matrix altogether. Yeah, I am sure it is possible to set up my own appservice, but ERC has been convenient enough for my use case.
- jeltz 3y agoI instead stopped using IRC since the Matrix bridge was the by far best bouncer I have used to date. The other bouncers I have used have just been annoying.
- brabel 3y agoI use it, from emacs, sometimes :D when you connect it actually tells you exactly how many users are on it, which seems to be quite a few: ** There are 73 users and 33193 invisible on 28 servers ** 39 operator(s) online ** 75 unknown connection(s) ** 22136 channels formed ** I have 1884 clients and 1 servers ** Current local users 1884, max 2958 ** Current global users 33266, max 34731 ** Highest connection count: 2959 (2958 clients) (25302 connections received) ** - platinum.libera.chat Message of the Day - ** - This server provided by NORDUnet/SUNET ** - Welcome to Libera Chat, the IRC network for ** - free & open-source software and peer directed projects.
- nerdponx 3y agoI was using it, but I kept getting kicked out of channels for idling too long. It wasn't a good experience, and I went back to just using IRC for IRC and Matrix for Matrix.
- mickael-kerjean 3y agoIRC is far from dead. My relatively unknown oss work has a channel on libera which is seeing ~100 message per month Also Slack made the same move a couple years ago, first trying to appeal to IRC users at the beginning and then shut it all off when they had everyone else
- tazjin 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised if by the time Matrix is cold as ice, IRC will still see activity. Sufficiently simple protocols have some aura of immortality to them, and Matrix is the opposite of that.
- jeltz 3y agoAs is IRC. IRC is only a simple protocol in an ideal world which no longer exists.
- tazjin 3y agoWhat do you think is not simple about IRC nowadays?
- dotnet00 3y agoObligatory relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
- dngray 3y agoI think the main benefit of Matrix over IRC, is proper E2EE and multi device support, something that simply isn't possible for IRC clients.
- dotnet00 3y agoAgreed, my friend group hosts a private Matrix server specifically for the E2EE (with encrypted history) chatrooms. Makes us all way more comfortable sharing or discussing anything involving PII because we aren't having to trust Discord's systems and employees.
- mort96 3y agoIRC is the best place to go to find developers of a whole host of open source projects. If you work with open source software, not using IRC really limits what you can do and who you can reach.
- Klonoar 3y agoThis is entirely dependent on what OSS you're working with, and not in any way representative of OSS as a whole.
- mort96 3y agoThat might be why I said “a whole host of open source projects” and not “all open source projects”.
- Klonoar 3y ago> If you work with open source software, not using IRC really limits what you can do and who you can reach. No, I was responding to the highlighted line here, which is fundamentally wrong. ;P
- mort96 3y agoI see. That doesn't make a difference though? Not using IRC limits who you can reach. In some projects, all the interesting people are easily reachable through IRC (and less reachable through other channels). Of course there are other projects where all the interesting people are reachable through matrix or gitter or zulip or slack, and if you're interacting with those projects, IRC won't do much to help you. That doesn't mean "not using IRC limits who you can reach" is false; it just means you may not have an interest of interacting with the people who you can't reach without IRC.
- dngray 3y agoNot really, just use Matrix and a bridge like Heisenbridge. The experience to me feels native as if the IRC users are using Matrix.